Bangkok Knights (14 page)

To my relief, Husband had stopped fooling around, and he
handed over his watch and wallet as well. His camera bag, however, was nowhere
to be seen, probably pushed up under the tarp. Wife was good for a handbag and
a Walkman.

Mr. Macho was standing with one hand on his head while he
forked over 300
baht
with the other. Tattoos said something to his
friend, who trained his pistol directly on Mr. Macho. The Pistolero reached up
and prodded Mr. Macho gently in the groin with his weapon. Mr. Macho
surrendered the shoulder bag containing his little automatic camera. Another
advantage of little automatic cameras, it didn’t hurt so much when you lost
them. He patted his hip pockets and vest to indicate they were empty, putting
on his honest face as best he could while wearing the shades. The Pistolero
stared silently into his face for a long moment, and then signaled he wanted
the glasses. Slipping them on, he turned briefly to get his partners’ approval.
It could not be denied — they did wonders for his image as a bandit. Mirrored
lenses are very useful; no one can see what your eyes are really doing, and if
you’ re also holding a gun, your victims’ imaginations will provide you with
eyes sufficient to make their blood run cold.

I noticed that Mr. Macho’s eyes were watering. He started
to wipe them, but the man with the shades waggled the gun barrel at him, and he
returned his hands to his head. The Pistolero reached into the shoulder bag and
removed Mr. Macho’s cigarillos, opening the neat leather case and extracting
one with an air of great satisfaction. He lit the hole cigar and sneered,
staring hard at Mr. Macho and blowing smoke up at his face.
“Nahphooying?
he
said contemptuously. “Face of a woman.”

I could sympathize with Mr. Macho’s discomfiture. It was
easier for me — I hadn’t had a chance to promote my own hero image, what with
the hangover and lack of sleep and everything. Relatively speaking, it was okay
for me to stand there like an impotent wimp in face of all this outrage. Or so
I told myself. I’d been pretty much the Invisible Man the whole day any way,
and now I concentrated on perfecting the role.

At least they’d left him him his belt and his boots, I’d
been thinking, but then they took those too, and Mr. Macho also had to worry
about his baggy pants falling down, standing there with his hands on his head.
On second thought they also took
my
belt, a nice narrow conservative
belt you ‘d never have suspected held two $ 100 bills folded up tight, not to
mention a couple of $500 travelers checks. They left me my sandals, however,
and I was grateful for small mercies. I made my face look inoffensive, even
friendly. Solidarity with the oppressed masses, and why shouldn’ t the wealth
be redistributed? Sure. After all.

It was funny, now that I thought about it—I hadn’ t seen
the boatman give over anything. Maybe these were some of those ‘communist
insurgents’ you read about in the papers: take from the rich; leave the poor
alone.

Attention now turned to BW. She had tried to go to the
Libber, who was still collapsed on the sand, but Tattoos intercepted her. The
Pistolero walked back to join them. The loony with the other M-16 called down
to them from the bank and the three of them had a good laugh together.

“You bastards!” The Libber had gotten up, and now she
suddenly launched herself at Tattoos. He turned to meet her rush with a full
slap that spun her reeling to the ground. He walked over and kicked her hard in
the side, and she curled up tight, gasping, but otherwise silent.

The Pistolero held BW from behind while Tattoos approached
her, thrusting his gun at her midsection, snagging BW’ s t-shirt with the
barrel and hiking it up, scraping her soft belly and revealing the heavy
underswell of her breasts. He made it plain what he wanted her to do, and the
Pistolero released her so she could pull the shirt off over her head, bending
and tugging and then standing again, shaking her fine mane of hair into place.
Her demeanor was calm but fragile; she stood erect, proud, perfectly tanned,
pear-shaped breasts defying their own weight and fully preoccupying the
assembly. The aureoles were big and pink against gold, and I wondered why they
weren’t tanned as well. The Pistolero pulled at the tight front of his jeans,
making room. There was a wheeze from the Libber, and BW began to cry silently,
not bothering to wipe at the tears running down her cheeks.

This was really getting rough, I thought. One’s code of
gentlemanly conduct indicated one should go to the ladies’ rescue. Only I
didn’t fancy being dead, especially now that the hangover had almost cleared
up. I looked over at Mr. Macho; it was hard to tell what he was thinking,
though anybody could see he wasn’t having a good time. Husband, I noticed, was
swinging his camera up to focus on ... Oh, my Christ, no, I thought. He
wasn’t... But he was; he was going to take a picture of the loony on the
embankment.

The Loony had been distracted by the events unfolding on
the sand, but now he noticed Husband. Casually, with a mocking smile and
appearing relaxed for the first time, he swung the M-16 up to his shoulder. The
muzzle moved through a short arc and he fired.

Wife was already screaming “Noooo!” in a voice filled with
urgency and despair. An M-16 makes a rather unimpressive noise —really not that
much of a bang. Still, the top of Husband’s head, just above the zoom lens,
blew right off. He stood there looking silly for a moment, while Wife
reiterated her denial, “Noooo! Please!” Then he slumped backwards, buckling at
the knees and falling over the side of the boat into the water. I noticed how
quickly clouds of red billowed and eddied away in the current

A moment of time extended in silence. Stretched out
forever. Then Wife screamed again. “You filthy sons of bitches! Noooo!” She
sank down on the tarp, giving herself up to sobbing, choking grief.

Tattoos and the Pistolero, meanwhile, were losing control.
The muzzles of their weapons nodded and waved and winked nervously as they
tried to cover the situation and at the same time tried to determine what the
Loony expected of them now. They paid no attention to BW as, still
bare-breasted, she moved to help the Libber to her feet. Up on the bank, the
bandit chief was wound tight, high on adrenalin and who knew what.

“Kha man tai hue mod” I heard. “Kill them!”

His colleagues seemed almost as alarmed as I felt, waving
their guns about as though to fend us off more than threaten, glancing back and
forth between us and the Loony.

He snapped something else at them that I couldn’t make
out. I heard a splash, and I realized the boatman had gone over the side. I was
myself preparing to crumple over backwards into the water with the first
gunfire. I preferred to do this alive, of course, and this meant I shouldn’t be
their first target. The Invisible Man. It’s better you take Mr. Macho first;
he’s an asshole.

The Loony shrieked something in rage and swung his M-16
across his men and towards us. This was it They steadied down and their guns
leveled with cold purpose.

At that moment there came the sound of a motor — a
long-tail boat coming up fast around the bend. No one moved, except for B W and
the Libber; they were lurching towards us, oblivious to the imminence of
violent, shocking death. At that range, the flat, nasty smack of bullet against
flesh and bone comes an instant before the sound of the shot, an almost
simultaneous
splat-bang.
I waited for it, willing my knees to buckle on
cue—at the split instant of the first gunfire.

The racket of the diesel cleared the turn in the river,
racing towards us.

The guns wavered again. Then a quick fat splatter of
raindrops strafed the beach. There was a breathless pause before a crack of
thunder rent the stillness, and the storm broke. Tattoos and the Pistolero
looked at each other, struck with consternation, and then they turned and ran,
much like a couple of
au bouffant
debutantes caught out in the rain. The
Loony fired a wild burst in the direction of the approaching boat before
disappearing into the deluge, dropping out of sight down the other side of the
bank.

I´d gone over the side the side; a neatly-executed
backwards tumble, an award-winning portrayal of a dead man going into the
river, I landed right on top of the boatman. It was entirely unnecessary, of
course. But what the hell, the way the rain was coming down I wouldn’t have
stayed any drier in the boat.

By the time the other boat had pulled in, Mr. Macho had
taken Wife in charge, and was hollering at me through the downpour, asking me
if I had any brandy. I didn’t have, more was the pity. I covered BW and the
Libber with my polyethylene sheet, and tried to get them to say they were okay.
A soldier and the driver from the other boat, together with our driver, fished
Husband out of the river and wrapped him up in plastic. Wife seemed
uninterested in his mortal remains — a sensible attitude, I thought, though one
that wouldn’t have made for very good cinema.

There were several travelers in the other boat; they were
most helpful, and had some Mekhong whiskey Mr. Macho could feed to Wife. It
wasn’t really the same as brandy, mind you, and she got sick on one mouthful
and wouldn’t try another. Mr. Macho managed a good belt of it himself, though.
The Libber had a big stash of Valiums; she gave three to Wife before dispensing
some more to BW and herself. Mr. Macho had another pull at the whiskey. A
sodden, dispirited crew we were. I guess we were all in a bit of shock, as
well.

“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Macho was saying to the new gang of
travelers. “We’ve had a rum go of it She has, you know—the wife, I mean. It was
that sudden. And the rest of us, we were that close to having the biscuit
ourselves I could feel the bullets. Too right. There was nothing you could do;
that was the worst of it”

And so on. This would become a better yarn than white-water
canoeing in Canada could ever have been.

We were taken back in convoy to where we’ d begun the
river excursion earlier that day. The remainder of the boat-ride was
uneventful. I devoted myself mostly to getting cozy under the plastic, steaming
away with BW and the Libber.

B W was actually named Eunice, I discovered, but she hated
the name and preferred to be called Sandy. I liked Sandy — name and girl
both—and I offered to take good care of her and the Libber, too, if I had to,
once back in town. After all, as I told them, I had more travelers checks in my
bag, thank God the bandits had never gotten around to unloading the luggage.
The Libber was called Jerry, which was short for Jessica or something, and she
told me they could look after themselves quite nicely, thank you anyway. The
two of them did some of the requisite blubbering and cuddling, and Jerry let me
know one way and another that Sandy had all the protection she needed and I
could stay under the plastic with them because it was raining but this didn’ t
mean we were old buddies and chances were we never would be either. I found
myself thinking it would not have been a bad idea if this lady had stepped on a
snake, after all. But Sandy didn’t give me a sign, so maybe it was never fated
to be in any case.

We didn’ t have to wait long at the pier for the police to
arrive and to escort us to the police station in Chiangmai for questioning.

Jerry was looking after Sandy, and Mr. Macho had Wife in
his care, so I gave the police the benefit of my perceptions. My main theory
was the boatman had had something to do with it all. How else could there have
been bandits at just that spot at just that time? But they were unimpressed by
this line of reasoning. Nor did they think it peculiar that the second boat, the
one with the armed escort, had abandoned us right at the outset What did
impress them was Husband’s stupidity. You almost got the feeling they felt he’d
deserved to get himself shot, he’d been such a lamebrain.

Anyway, they took our descriptions — three young men in
T-shirts and jeans, one looking like a loony, one like a pistolero, one covered
in tattoos — and assured us justice would be done, no matter our descriptions
fitted half the young men in northern Thailand.

But Husband’s camera promised to make it easier for them.
After the storm had broken, I’d noticed Husband’s sturdy old Nikon lying in the
bottom of the boat where he’d dropped it. Tucking it away under the tarp, I
suddenly wondered if he’d gotten that last picture, just before he died. What a
great photo to illustrate a story. For a moment, I found myself weighing the
pros and cons of removing the film and pocketing it. Of course, this smacked
more than a little of looting the dead, and even if I were to have pleaded
journalistic license, the police would’ve called it removing evidence in a
murder case. However you looked at it, it would’ve been a crummy thing to do, I
suppose.

Under questioning, both Mr. Macho and I had the distinct
impression the shutter had fired before the M-16 had.
Snick-splat-bang,
it
had gone.

Wife told the cops they could take film and camera, when
they asked, and she didn’t care what they did with them.

Mr. Macho had been the only one to lose all of his money
in the robbery, and I lent him a bit to tide him over—so he could buy something
to wear on his feet, and whatnot.

I met him in Bangkok a week later, to collect my money.
His name was Robin Pilcher, but I could call him ‘Robbo’. He was still grinning
and glowing away with tanned good health, and he was still wearing a vest with
nothing underneath. I saw he was sporting brand-new lizard-skin boots, and I
wondered if he had a new knife.

Robbo and I ordered more beer, and he told me how he’d
stayed there in Chiangmai for a few days and looked after Wife.

Actually, her name was Ellen. Ellen Brown, from Sandusky. Husband’s name had been Stanley.